Monthly Archives: June 2007

youth voting rose in ’06

CIRCLE released our analysis today of the Census Department’s 2006 voting survey. (The data were released yesterday.) We found that the turnout of young people rose to 25.5%–a low rate, admittedly, but a nice rise compared to 2002. It was also the second consecutive increase. The trend is especially impressive because turnout of the whole population hardly increased at all in 2006. The boost appears to be a youth phenomenon, caused either by the Millennials’ political consciousness or by deliberate youth turnout operations–or both.

On a personal note, I’m relieved that the estimate we released on the day after the election, based on exit polls and accompanied by lots of caveats about the margin of error, turned out to be very close, even slightly conservative.

Meanwhile, I’m helping to run a conference for “emerging scholars” who study service-learning. Each emerging scholar–a graduate student or a junior professor–presents a paper and is assigned senior mentors who are scholars or advocates. This is a deliberate effort to strengthen and diversify the next generation of scholars who study a form of education that appears, at the least, to be highly promising.

Günter Grass’s memories

The June 4 New Yorker presents an excerpt from Günter Grass’s memoir, Peeling the Onion. For the first time, we get the novelist’s own lengthy account of his experiences in the Waffen S.S., a story that he had suppressed for about 60 years. The New Yorker (or possibly Grass) chose an excerpt that is action-packed. There is not too much rumination about what the experience meant or why he failed to mention it during the decades when he bitterly denounced German hypocrisy about the Nazi past. Instead, the thrilling adventures of a young man at war make us highly sympathetic. We root for him to survive, notwithstanding the double-S on his collar. And as we read the exciting story (under the flip headline of “Personal History: How I Spent the War”), our eyes wander to amusing cartoons about midlife crises.

I would not be quick to condemn a 16-year-old for joining the S.S., although that was a much worse thing to do than joining a gang and selling drugs, for which we imprison 16-year-olds today. For me, the interesting moral question is what the famous and accomplished adult Günter Grass did with his memories.

So … why run an excerpt that is mainly about his exciting adventures in the war? Why not write about the 60-year cover-up? Why introduce the memoir in English in a very lucrative venue, America’s most popular literary magazine? Also, why write only from his personal perspective, saying almost nothing about the nature of the S.S. or its reputation among German civilians at the time?

Grass cannot recall precisely what the S.S. meant to him when he was assigned to it. But he thinks it had a “European aura to it,” since it comprised “separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch and Belgian. …” The von Frundsberg Division, to which he was assigned, was named after “someone who stood for freedom, liberation.” And once Grass was in the S.S., where he was exposed to many months of training, “there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light.”

This paragraph continues: “But the ignorance I claim cannot blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be accused to active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.”

I do not know whether the factual claim here is credible. I must say I find it very surprising that in the course of a whole autumn and winter of S.S. training, there was “no mention” of war crimes. Maybe the details of the death camps were not discussed, but I am amazed that the S.S. trainers never talked in general terms about violence against Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic and other civilian populations. That was a different kind of “European aura”: the attempted slaughter of several whole European peoples.

Regardless of what precisely Grass heard in his S.S. training, I find his reflection on “joint responsibility” troubling. He says he has no “active complicity,” even though he had joined the S.S. when he could have found his way into the army. His involvement in the Holocaust is passive: “I was incorporated into a system. …” As a result of this bad moral luck, he feels “joint responsibility”–a term that is “all too often” used. (Actually, I find this sentence hard to interpret and evasive. Is the term “joint responsibility” used when it does not apply? Does it apply in his case?) Finally, Grass emphasizes the distress that his passive complicity has always caused him and will continue to cause him for the rest of his life. There is no hint of an apology for the harm that his active decision to join the S.S. might have caused other people. And then the memoir proceeds to make him its hero–his survival a happy ending.

I would forgive Grass instantly if he took personal responsibility for what he did at age 16 and 17. I am not so sure I like how he is behaving at age 80.

a new progressive era?

Tomorrow, I’m presenting at the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) National Policy Forum. I’ve been invited to speak on a panel entitled, “A New Progressive Era? The Influence of State and Local Initiatives on National Policy.” Presumably, I was invited because I wrote a book entitled The New Progressive Era. I don’t have much to say about the real topic of the panel, which is whether “recent local and state initiatives on employment and labor relations” will lead to “national level policies.” If I’m going to be any help at all, I need to reflect on general parallels between the Progressive Era (1900-1924) and today. This will also be a chance to present a different view of the original progressive movement than the one I held in the 1990s.

Huge changes occurred during the Progressive Era, and the word “progressive” had such positive connotations at the time that proponents of every important development liked to call it “progressive.” (Walter Lippmann observed in 1921 that “an American will endure almost any insult except the charge that he is not progressive.”)

Among the important changes that could be called “progressive” were: administrative centralization in industry and government; specialization, professionalization, and the cult of science and expertise throughout society; the increased use of formal rules and regulations in both government and business, often to protect consumers; reform legislation designed to reduce the impact of money in politics; the “efficiency movement”; the growth of organized labor (which mimicked forms of administration seen in business and the state); and a new ideal of citizenship. Whereas the 19th century citizen was supposed to be a loyal and enthusiastic member of an identity group, the progressive citizen was supposed to be an independent, informed judge of public policies. That ideal led to concrete reforms such as the secret ballot and attacks on political parties. Overall, politics became less “popular,” more a matter of expert administration; and turnout dropped accordingly.

In my book, my heroes were Robert M. La Follette, Sr., Jane Addams, John Dewey, and their associates. Although these three surely deserve the label “progressive” (for instance, La Follette won the Progressive Party nomination), they were ambivalent about the main trends I mentioned above. In the Library of Congress, I read a book manuscript that La Follette wrote–but for some reason never published–criticizing the state government of Wisconsin for becoming overly professionalized, expert-driven, bureaucratic, and distant from ordinary people. Jane Addams battled the Chicago Democratic machine but wrote appreciatively of the emotional connection between a machine Alderman and his constituents. Compared to the “village kindness” of the ward boss, she wrote, “the notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent …. The reformers give themselves over largely to criticisms of the present state of affairs, to writing and talking of what the future must be; but their goodness is not dramatic; it is not even concrete and human.”

I thought that my favorite progressives were characterized by three main principles:

  • They were democrats, willing to do what the public wanted rather than push policies that they favored for theoretical reasons. That was the heart of Dewey’s pragmatism: a rejection of general rules and a commitment to democratic processes. It is what separated all of my heroes from the Socialist Party of the time, which used democratic procedures but which was wedded to Marxist principles. La Follette embodied Deweyan pragmatism even before Dewey wrote any influential books. As a candidate, La Follette typically avoided strong policy proposals but argued for a more democratic process and pledged to do what the people wanted. Most of his policies were procedural–campaign finance, lobby disclosure, and the like.
  • They were egalitarians, critics of political processes that gave some people more power than others because of money, secrecy, or administrative structures.
  • They loved deliberation. La Follette printed the following words by Margaret Woodrow Wilson on the front cover of his popular Weekly in 1914: “No wonder that [politicians] do not always know what the people want. Let us get together so that we may tell them. All of our representatives are organized into deliberative bodies. We, whom they represent, ought also to be organized for deliberation. When this happens, and then only, shall we vote intelligently.” For these reformers, democratic participation did not mean developing preferences and expressing them in the ballot box or the marketplace. It rather meant discussion, listening and persuading–collective education.

    • I would now add a fourth principle:

  • They understood that deliberation and democracy could not be achieved through changes in rules and processes alone. Citizens needed new skills and identities in order to participate. Culture-change was essential. This explains why they built model institutions with strong democratic cultures, such as Hull-House, the Chicago Lab School, and the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Debating and Public Discussion, which sent 80,000 background papers per year to citizen groups.

    • The people I’m calling Progressives faced several serious dilemmas that we still haven’t solved. It was hard to sustain public support for “democracy” without promising concrete social and economic changes. Yet to promise a particular policy, such as a child-labor law, meant circumventing public discussion and dialogue. Progressives appealed to the general or public interest, but people understandably identified with narrower group interests. The Progressives built impressive small institutions that were genuinely deliberative and democratic; but they never figured out how to increase the scale of these efforts. For example, Deweyan educational practices, when implemented on a large scale, became grotesque parodies of his ideas. Finally, despite their ambivalence about expertise and centralization, the Progressives never designed large and strong institutions that remained participatory and egalitarian. The Wisconsin state government that La Follette criticized as bureaucractic and arrogant was the very same government that he had built during his own gubernatorial administration. Although he wasn’t directly responsible for how it developed, he did not know how to stop it from becoming a Weberian bureaucracy.

    Despite these dilemmas, I believe the Progressives whom I admire contributed an enormous amount to mid-20th-century liberalism. Most progressives (including Dewey) were ambivalent about the New Deal. But the New Deal benefited from the open deliberations of the Progressive Era (which generated a host of creative policy ideas) and from ordinary people’s trust in public institutions. People trusted the government and were willing to spend tax money on it because–among other reasons–many teachers, social workers, conservationists, and other public employees had Deweyan traditions of working collaboratively with laypeople. For instance, neighbors of Hull House and its employees had real mutual accountability and respect. So when Hull-House was “taken to scale” in the New Deal, people could feel a place in the new government agencies.

    In short, Progressive-Era pragmatism contributed to something that it wasn’t–to the ideology of mid-century liberalism that dominated government from the FDR to LBJ. Liberalism was a robust ideology because it had: a comprehensive diagnosis of social problems, a store of moving rhetoric and famous leaders, an impressive array of policies and institutions, and a set of active constituencies, many of which benefited from liberal policies. Thus the ideology replicated itself from generation to generation.

    But, in my opinion, mid-century liberalism has been dead for 25 years. The Great Society diagnosis doesn’t fit our contemporary problems, many of which have strong cultural dimensions. The leftover institutions, such as public schools and environmental agencies, are insufficiently participatory and accountable. The liberal constituency has shattered, in part because people don’t have good reasons to trust the government.

    The time is ripe for a revival of La Follette-style pragmatic progressivism. An open-ended, deliberative approach to politics is timely now because we don’t have any impressive ideologies. (Conservatism is as dead as liberalism is). An enthusiasm for deliberation is appropriate for an era in which we have exciting new techniques and technologies for public discussion and collaboration. It’s time for a new look at government agencies now that businesses and nonprofits are becoming less hierarchical and “flatter.” And small-scale experimentation is appropriate given the frailties of our large public institutions. Today’s charter schools, watershed restoration projects, community development corporations, and land trusts may well be our equivalents of settlement houses and lab schools.

    at cygyzy

    I’m going to New Hampshire just for today to speak at City Year’s annual conference, which is called “cygyzy” (that’s Greek for “a rare alignment of celestial bodies”). City Year, a part of Americorps, is a full-time program for about 1,200 young adults–some on a college track, and some not–who work in teams on service projects. With characteristic savvy, City Year is holding cygyzy ’07 in New Hampshire during the presidential primary season and has lined up Bill Clinton, Judd Gregg, Jim Lehrer, and various other luminaries as keynote speakers.

    Fittingly, I’ll speak to a smaller group; and I’m planning to make the following argument:

    We have traditionally defined and defended programs such as City Year as “voluntary service.” That seems politically smart–who’s against service? Accordingly, we have justified City Year in two main ways. First, it’s supposed to be a very cost-effective–in fact, downright cheap–means of providing social services, such as mentoring and camp counseling for disadvantaged kids. Second, it’s supposed to benefit the City Year volunteers, who acquire leadership skills and probably gain psychological benefits, too. Looked at that way, the City Year volunteers are actually the recipients of “services”–again, at low cost.

    These justifications are problematic. Maybe City Year provides cheap services, but its corps members are paid, in part with federal funds. Doesn’t the taxpayer get an even better deal from completely unpaid voluntary service? The Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs Americorps, likes to note that Americans give away $152 billion in services every year by volunteering. If we are primarily interested in how much “service” Americans generate, $152 billion of free labor utterly dwarfs City Year’s federal funding and renders the program rather trivial.

    Likewise, the benefits to the corps members seem beside the point. They don’t volunteer to gain leadership skills. They are “putting idealism to work.”

    So I want to make a much bigger claim for City Year. Its corps members are not engaged in voluntary service; they are citizen workers. America desperately needs citizen workers, and City Year provides a model, a training program, and a laboratory.

    The word “citizen” bothers some of us because it excludes immigrants, who can obviously benefit their communities even if they aren’t naturalized. At the same time, it includes George W. Bush, Bill Gates, and your local school superintendent; but we don’t mean them when we think of “citizen work.” Still, it’s the best word I can think of for an active member of the national community, someone who has standing, dignity, and the ability to contribute simply by virtue of belonging. If you’re born or naturalized in the USA, you don’t have to qualify for citizenship by getting specialized training or credentials or by obtaining a special office. You are a citizen by right.

    But citizens who do “citizen work” are not merely people who belong to the community. They contribute actively. They may be pursuing a whole career of public service, contributing occasionally as part of their jobs, or giving unpaid time after work. They not only provide services, but also help to define problems in discussion with other citizens. The develop and implement plans for addressing those problems.

    Today, America faces grievous challenges, such as a high school dropout rate of one third, homeland security threats, and global warming.

    America has never overcome any major challenge without tapping the skills, energies, and passions of millions of our citizens. Citizen work is the genius of American democracy.

    But citizen work is in decline. People are substantially less likely to work on community projects or to attend meetings than they were a generation ago. This is why programs like City Year are so important: as models of a different kind of politics.

    is the problem with Washington’s schools that we lack a state?

    I’m fascinated by the Washington, DC public school system, which is educating my younger child, employing my wife, and serving the city in which I live. As reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, DC ranks first among the nation’s 100 largest school districts in the percentage of its funds devoted to administration (56%), and last in the percentage of funds devoted to instruction (41%). Just short of $13,000 is appropriated per child in the system–an amount that has risen rapidly as enrollments have dropped–but only $5,355 is spent on teachers, classroom equipment, and other forms of “instruction.”

    The educational results are equally dismaying. Of 11 major cities that collected comparable data on reading and math in 2005 (from the NAEP), DC ranked last in proficiency. We remained in last place even when comparisons were made only among poor students in those 11 cities. We were thus surpassed by several cities with bad reputations for public education, including Cleveland, Atlanta, and Chicago.

    I do not understand how to tackle these problems. I think all the major ideas on the table are inadequate. (For instance, our experience with charters shows that we cannot achieve very much by enhancing competition, decentralizing control, or avoiding unions.) For today, I’ll just contribute to the debate in a very modest way. Some defenders of our system argue that DC suffers from not having a state. Whatever services are provided by state agencies in other jurisdictions must be covered by the city’s budget in Washington. But Maryland spends $112 million of its own funds (not federal aid) on its state education agency (source). There are about 852,920 enrolled students in Maryland schools. That means that the state spends $131 per kid per year on statewide education services. If Washington got that much help from a state education agency, it would be like increasing our schools’ funding by 1.011% .

    In other words, the lack of a state education agency is no excuse.